Banca de DEFESA: CAROLINA ZIMMER

Uma banca de DEFESA de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : CAROLINA ZIMMER
DATE: 15/01/2026
TIME: 09:30
LOCAL: plataforma digital - google meet
TITLE:

Oxalá united us: an ethnographic study on the Umbanda religious experience in the individuation process

KEY WORDS:

Complex Psychology, Individuation Process, Psychology of Religion, Umbanda, Ethnography.

PAGES: 195
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Psicologia
SUBÁREA: Psicologia Social
SPECIALTY: Papéis e Estruturas Sociais; Indivíduo
SUMMARY:

This study investigates how the religious experiences of Umbanda practitioners influence their individuation processes and contribute to transformations in collective consciousness. The research is anchored in Carl Gustav Jung's Complex Psychology, articulated with the notion of colonization of the imaginary proposed by historian Serge Gruzinski, also integrating contributions from sociology, anthropology, and religious sciences. The methodological approach combines Clifford Geertz's interpretative ethnography, through participant observation, in-depth interviews and analysis of ritual and symbolic elements, with the symbolic-archetypal processing method developed by Eloísa Penna, allowing access to the unconscious meanings emerging from religious experiences at multiple levels. The empirical fieldwork was conducted at an Umbanda temple located in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The results indicate that Umbanda offers a liminal space of welcome where body and psyche are no longer understood as separate spheres. Mediumistic practices and religious rituals function as symbolic mediation devices between the unconscious and consciousness, enabling emerging images to be recognized, elaborated and integrated. This process promotes psychosomatic health, strengthens the identity of practitioners and catalyzes the transformation of affective complexes through the symbolic updating of their contents. At the same time, the terreiro is a space for reworking historical social wounds, such as those of a racial nature, acting on collective memory and offering symbolic compensation that legitimizes and reinscribes previously marginalized knowledge. The research shows that Umbanda religiosity acts as a means of listening, caring for, and integrating unconscious content into consciousness, articulating subjective processes and collective dimensions in a ritual field that embraces Brazilian symbolic diversity. This set of findings reveals promising possibilities for future research, such as the impact of ritual practices on indicators of physical and mental health; the articulation between psychic energy, healing, and psychosomatic processes; the phenomenology of altered states of consciousness; the effects of music, song, and dance on affective regulation; and differential criteria for distinguishing constructive symbolic expressions from psychopathological conditions. These fronts confirm Umbanda, a religion that synthesizes the dynamics of Afro-Amerindian and European matrices, as a privileged laboratory for the advancement of Complex Psychology in dialogue with plural cultural contexts, by highlighting unique modes of symbolic mediation between the individual and the collective.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1805319 - RONALD CLAY DOS SANTOS ERICEIRA
Externo à Instituição - GUSTAVO BORGES DE OLIVEIRA
Externo à Instituição - MAICON DA SILVA MOREIRA - UNIG